They take it on the chin time and time again for publishing fake news about President Donald J. Trump and his administration. But they continue to allow themselves to be played, even as the last shards of their credibility fade away because they are so wedded to their Alt-Left ideology and Trump hate.

That’s loyalty to a cause, no matter how stupid and idiotic it is, considering that without credibility, eventually, they won’t have much of an audience.

The Washington Post is the latest outlet to get burned ginning up phony allegations against the Trump administration — a dishonor the paper is actually committing fairly routinely in the Age of Trump.

Policy analysts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta were told of the list of forbidden words at a meeting Thursday with senior CDC officials who oversee the budget, according to an analyst who took part in the 90-minute briefing. The forbidden words are “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based” and “science-based.”

In some instances, the analysts were given alternative phrases. Instead of “science-based” or ­“evidence-based,” the suggested phrase is “CDC bases its recommendations on science in consideration with community standards and wishes,” the person said. In other cases, no replacement words were immediately offered.

After making its blanket claims, the story then attempts to muddy the waters a bit by stating that some terms supposedly prohibited in draft budget documents “had been conveyed verbally” in a meeting among career officials at the CDC — hard to verify. Still, the principal claim is that the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the CDC, wants the terms banned.

The only problem with this is that it didn’t happen — at least, not in the context of the Post’s story (Trump sucks, he’s a bigot, his people suck and are bigots, etc.).

What seems to have happened here involves two sets of circumstances. First, the budget office at HHS sent the various divisions of the department a style guide to use in their budget-proposal language and “congressional justification” documents for the coming year. That style guide, which sets out a standard style for everything from capitalization of the titles of key offices to some commonly disputed points of grammar and punctuation, also sets out some words to be avoided. These, I am told, are avoided because they are frequently misused or regularly overused in departmental documents (make of that what you will) and they include three terms on the Post’s list: “vulnerable,” “diversity,” and “entitlement.” The style guide does not prohibit the use of these terms, but it says they should be used only when alternatives (which it proposes in some cases) cannot be.

He says further that he doesn’t remember using a style guide when he worked at HHS and the White House during the Bush years, but one person he spoke with suggested there was one in the Obama administration.

A more viable explanation for some of the more inflammatory words is “not that retrograde Republicans ordered career CDC officials not to use these terms but that career CDC officials assumed retrograde Republicans would be triggered by such words and, in an effort to avoid having such Republicans cut their budgets, reasoned they might be best avoided,” Levin added.

And if you don’t believe him, perhaps you’ll believe the director of the CDC, who tweeted there are “no banned words” at her agency.

I want to assure you there are no banned words at CDC. We will continue to talk about all our important public health programs.